A "hit squad" will be parachuted by the health secretary into five hospital trusts and six others will be put into special measures in an effort to urgently improve patient care in parts of the NHS which have reported high death rates.

Jeremy Hunt is expected to announce the moves on Tuesday as part of his response to a five-month inquiry into unusually high mortality rates at 14 hospital trusts across England. The inquiry has uncovered poor care and poor leadership or both at 11 of the trusts.

North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs the Cumberland Infirmary in Carlisle and West Cumberland hospital in Whitehaven, will be among those receiving a visit from a team of regulators at the NHS Trust Development Authority (TDA) sent by Hunt.

Four others will face the same action: East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust; George Eliot Hospital NHS Trust in Nuneaton, Warwickshire; United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust; and Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust. The special teams of experts will supervise the trusts' progress in pushing through remedial action to tackle weaknesses found by the NHS's medical director, Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, and his inspectors.

That move will allow Monitor to use its powers to oblige failing trusts to improve areas of their performance identified as sub-standard by the Keogh inquiry.

The six will have to provide undertakings that they will address key inadequacies urgently, for example by commissioning a review of the problem from external consultants and then following its recommendations.

The moves, involving both sets of hospitals, will put extra pressure on the chief executives, medical directors and boards of governors of the 11 trusts, any of whom are at risk of being ousted if improvements are deemed unsatisfactory.

No departures are expected immediately, though. The trusts will be given a few months to tackle problems that, in some cases, have been the subject of concern over a number of years.

Hunt's desire to see some NHS leaders forced out over Keogh's findings have been stymied by the fact that some of those in charge at the most troubled trusts are recent appointees and are judged to be doing their best to alleviate some deep-seated problems.

North Cumbria, for example, has an interim chief executive, Ann Farrar, who is doing the job temporarily on secondment from nearby Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, which is bidding to mount a takeover of the Cumbria trust.

Keogh will also point to how quality of patient care at North Cumbria was compromised by major staffing problems, especially a difficulty in recruiting enough doctors, most notably at its Whitehaven hospital.

In March the Care Quality Commission (CQC), which monitors hospital care standards, said that the North Cumbria trust was not meeting the required standards in relation to care and welfare of patients, staffing levels and patient records management. It has since produced an action plan, and more staff are now working across both sites – which are 39 miles apart – to try to overcome local shortages until more clinical staff can be recruited.

Nevertheless, MPs and patient groups are likely to ask why Monitor, the CQC and the boards of some individual trusts did not pick up problems sooner and insist on improvements.

No 10 signalled it was planning to take tough line with the leadership of failing hospitals, saying it was demanding a culture of accountability in the NHS. Asked if members of trust boards that have failed should be suspended, the prime minister's spokesman said David Cameron had already said a single failure regime would be established, implying managers that had overseen failure would not be receiving a second chance.

Tories were also planning to train their fire on the shadow health secretary Andy Burnham, saying he had been responsible for the NHS between 2009 and 2010, and failed to act at the time on the evidence of failure.

Burnham argues that the record demonstrates he never sought to suppress any report at the time, and that it is becoming clear that the government is involved in an increasingly open campaign to undermine public faith in the NHS, and so remove the issue from the next election.

On Monday it emerged that NHS inspectors found worrying shortfalls in the operation of the A&E unit at Tameside and demanded urgent improvements.

The CQC sent inspectors into the hospital on 11 and 15 May after concerns about poor care and patient safety were raised in an independent report from emergency care experts and the local postgraduate medical dean in charge of junior doctors' training.